Alibaba Launches Mobile Game Service

The move is part of Alibaba’s efforts to make sure it can hold onto its shopping sites’ vast user base when more consumers access online services through mobile phones rather than PCs.

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For the first time, Alibaba made three games available through its Mobile Taobao shopping application and its Laiwang smartphone messaging app.

According to Alibaba, Mobile Taobao users who play mobile games through the app will have chance to win some points that can be redeemed for discounts when they use Alibaba’s online shopping services. Players can win those points depending on how well they do in the games.

For now, there is only one game being offered through Mobile Taobao and two games on Laiwang, but Alibaba says it will be increasing the number of games soon.

This is the latest step by Alibaba to make its e-commerce and other services more attractive to hundreds of millions of smartphone users in China. Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall shopping sites have so far dominated China’s e-commerce market, but the company faces new challenges as it tries to adapt to the growth of mobile Internet.

In mobile-based services, Alibaba’s toughest rival is Tencent Holdings, a giant in online gaming and social networking services. Tencent’s biggest advantage is the popularity of its smartphone chat app WeChat, which is by far the most popular mobile messaging service in China and has more than 270 million monthly active users world-wide. Analysts say Tencent could turn WeChat into a broader platform for offering a wide range of services, including mobile games or even e-commerce.

Alibaba has already taken some other steps to generate more traffic for its mobile-based services. Last year, the company invested in Sina’s Twitter-like Weibo service and integrated some of Taobao’s product listing functions into the microblog.

For Alibaba, its main channel for mobile-based services has so far been Mobile Taobao, the mobile app version of its Taobao shopping site, a gigantic online marketplace with more than 800 million items from over 7 million merchants. Alibaba is also trying to promote Laiwang, which competes against WeChat but has a much smaller user base.